Voters were being asked if they support the European Union’s association agreement with Ukraine, which aims to foster better trade relations with the war-torn country and former Soviet satellite.
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After a day of sluggish voting, the first exit polls released by public broadcaster NOS left broad political uncertainty in a ballot being widely watched in Europe and Moscow.
While the referendum is on a technical issue to do with the bloc’s relationship with Ukraine, and an inevitable EU membership for the Eastern European country, voters are said to have treated the plebiscite as a vote on their confidence in the EU and their country’s membership of it.
Its outcome is not binding on government policy, but Dutch politicians have warned that rejecting it would hand a symbolic victory to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It may be expected that a compromise will be sought within the Council of the EU to save this part of the agreement, while somehow taking into account the concerns expressed in the Dutch referendum”, said Peter van Elsuwege, professor of the EU law at Ghent European Law Institute (GELI).
Rutte added that his government will consult with parliament and its European partners “step by step, that could take days or weeks”, Reuters reported. Whereas the EU’s other 27 states have waved the treaty through, some in the Netherlands oppose what they say is a precursor to Ukraine’s accession to the EU.
“If the Dutch people vote no today, it will be a incentive for the British voters to say no”, Wilders said.
At 32.2 per cent, the turnout was low but above the 30 per cent threshold for the vote to be valid.
Closer integration with Europe and giving its citizens visa-free travel across much of the continent has been one of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s major goals.
There could also be far-reaching consequences for the fragile Dutch coalition government, which now holds the rotating European Union presidency and which has lost popularity amid a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment.
This mechanism has been used to call a referendum on whether the Dutch should endorse an EU-Ukraine trade deal that the Dutch parliament has already endorsed.
The referendum result could also boost Wilders’s Freedom Party (PVV) which is already riding high in the polls due to his stand against refugees. The Netherlands is the only country that has not done so.
“I would like to emphasise that this referendum has an exclusively consultative nature under the constitution and legislation of the Netherlands”, the Ukraine president said in a statement on Thursday.
The referendum topic has a particular resonance for the Netherlands, following the downing of Malaysian Airways flight MH17, which killed all 298 people on board, including 193 Dutch citizens.
The EU-Ukraine agreement was signed by Ukraine’s new pro-Western government in June 2014.
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REUTERS/Michael KoorenAn unidentified jogger runs past a billboard with posters about the consultative referendum on the association between Ukraine and the European Union in a park in Utrecht, the Netherlands, April 6, 2016.
